A Bedouin Tracker and the Last Woman Held in Gaza Come Home

The bodies of two hostages returned from Gaza on Wednesday night were identified as those of Sergeant Major Muhammad el-Atrash, a Bedouin soldier, and Inbar Hayman, the last woman still held in the Strip.

El-Atrash, 39, was a tracker in the Northern Brigade of the Israel Defense Forces' Gaza Division and one of the army's most experienced Bedouin soldiers. He was killed fighting Hamas gunmen near Nahal Oz, a kibbutz on the Gaza boundary, on 7 October 2023, and his body was taken into Gaza. His fate was uncertain for months until the army confirmed in June 2024, on the basis of new evidence and intelligence, that he had fallen in battle. The eldest of 23 siblings, he first enlisted in 2003. According to the IDF he is survived by his parents, 22 siblings, two wives, Amna and Ktimal, and 13 children, the youngest born only weeks before his death. Relatives said they had been shown footage confirming that his body was taken to Gaza.

Hayman, 27, was working in a welfare role at the Nova music festival when Hamas attacked at dawn. As the shooting started she hid beneath the main stage, then tried to escape by car and afterwards on foot. Witnesses said that while fleeing she stopped to help another woman who was struggling to run from two armed men on a motorcycle. The attackers caught up with her and she resisted capture; witnesses later told investigators she was shot after fighting back, and her body was taken to Gaza. She was initially listed among the living hostages, and the IDF concluded in December 2023 that she had been killed that day.

What an IDF tracker does

Trackers are a small, distinctive part of the Israeli army, and nearly all of them are Bedouin. They work the length of Israel's frontiers (with Jordan, Egypt, Gaza, Syria and Lebanon, and in the West Bank), reading footprints, disturbed ground and other traces to identify crossings, and they are typically first to a scene after an incident, the Times of Israel reported in a 2012 profile of the unit, which also noted the tension between trackers' service and the position of Bedouin communities in the Negev. It is a specialism built on knowledge of desert ground that cannot be learned from a map.

The festival Hayman was working at

The Nova festival, formally the Supernova Sukkot Gathering, was held in the western Negev about 5km from the Gaza boundary, near Kibbutz Re'im. It was the deadliest single location of 7 October: an IDF investigation published in April 2025 counted 378 people killed there, 344 of them civilians, and 44 abducted, according to a compiled account of the massacre.

How the two were brought back and named

Under the American-brokered ceasefire that took effect in October 2025, Hamas undertook to return all remaining hostages, living and dead; the living came out on 13 October and the bodies followed slowly, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. Hamas passed the caskets to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which handed them to Israeli troops for transfer to the Abu Kabir forensic institute in Tel Aviv; at the time of this handover Hamas said it had recovered all the deceased captives it could reach, citing rubble, unexploded ordnance and collapsed tunnels, a claim Israeli officials rejected, the Times of Israel reported. Identification at the institute uses CT scans, DNA matched against family samples and dental records, and can take from about an hour and a half to several days, the Jerusalem Post reported.

What is still unclear

Neither the army nor the government said where in Gaza either body had been held or how it was recovered. The accounts of Hayman's last minutes come from witnesses at the festival rather than from a published investigation, and no forensic findings on either death were released. The original release put the number of hostages' bodies still in Gaza at 21; Times of Israel reporting on this same handover put it at 19, and the count changed repeatedly as the transfers went on.